IBM Announces Power 6 Blades and Software

The J2SS Blade Center triggers a new virtualization drive. The Linux-friendly system helps operators save electricity.

Parallel to the announcement of the JS22 Express Blade Center with Power 6 CPUs that support Linux, IBM has announced two software units designed to help customers save hardware and electricity. Advanced Power Virtualization is part of IBM's Power 6 technology and designed to support up to ten virtual servers on a single processor core. The latest version of Active Energy Manager, an power monitoring tool, allows customers to cap power consumption. This and other projects are part of IBM's Big Green campaign (see the separate article here).

Inside a Power 6 blade server. The pictures shows an IBM engineer fitting a memory module.

Unix customers additionally have the ability to migrate, move or replace components without downtime: Live Partition Mobility is a Power 6 platform feature which is only implemented for Unix. It gives administrators the ability to physically move complete operating system partitions in production environments.The feature is incluced with the Enterprise Edition of Advanced Power Virtualization, and not available for other CPUs or operating systems.

Blade servers with Power 6 CPUs will be available in H cases and HT cases as of November 2007, says the vendor. A JS22 express configuration with 4GB RAM and 73GB disk capacity in an H case will cost US$ 10,363, although resellers may offer the system at different prices. Advanced Power Virtualization (Standard Edition) will be available as of mid-November and is included with POWER-based blade servers. Active Energy Manager will be available as of mid-December. Energy management and power consumption capping cost around US$ 100 per system. More information on Energy Manager will be available here as of November 13, says IBM.

The Xeon 7300er processor family is Intel's first quad-core processor for multiple processor servers. The energy efficiency of the new processors differs depending on the speed with 2.93 GHz requiring 130 Watts compared to 50 Watts for a 1.86 GHz version.